One of the dilemmas of those who want to build a marketplace is what method to choose: out-of-the-box marketplace builder or custom solution. In this article, we want to focus on the platforms, that have achieved a market fit with SAAS builder and now need to move further and scale.

Let’s see what to do in such a case.

Building a marketplace. when SAAS builder is a nice choice

Today, the number of available marketplace builders is more than enough. Don’t get lost among them and grab the most advertised, but think hard about what you want to achieve at this moment. Focus on your needs, goals, and potential first, and then choose the best tool that will match your requirements.

Recently, we have discussed when SAAS marketplace builders are the best choice in the article “Start Your Own Marketplace: Custom development or SAAS builders”. If you want to know about it in more detail, you are welcome to check it out. As for now, I want to outline the main cases, when SAAS is the exact solution you need when you build your own marketplace:

If you build MVP to test your product on market and gain the first user base.

If you want to build a simple e-commerce or multi-vendor marketplace with basic out-of-the-box features like search, filtering, and comparison.

Mostly, SAAS builders are used for early-stage marketplaces, that want to test the product on the market.

However, there are a lot of cases, when entrepreneurs build a marketplace with the help of ready-made solutions, but then their product grows, a number of users and purchases increases, and they find out that the platform no longer suits their business model.

Let’s review these cases more deeply.

Moving forward: When it may be the time to build a custom marketplace

You have passed MVP stage and gained market fit

Gain a market fit - this is definitely the most сherished dream of marketplace owners. What does it mean? This means that you understand the problems of your customers, you have found your target audience, your product brings you revenue, and your customers can easily tell its benefits.

You need to enrich your marketplace with more personalized features and integrations

Usually, when you have validated your product, your users may require additional and customized for them features and integrations, especially when it comes to the multi-vendor marketplace. Marketplace app builders usually provide limited options, so you may not always customize your platform to the extent you need.

For example, we, at Apiko, have received a request from car rental marketplace, that wanted to move from Sharetribe and create a custom marketplace app. The reason was that their marketplace “grew” out of the Sharetribe platform and they needed to rewrite it from scratch.

Here are some of the features, that were difficult to implement with Sharetribe

Disadvantages of SAAS builders in сase your marketplace grows big

When your project becomes bigger and your users require more personalized features, it may be difficult to implement them within a platform architecture.

Before choosing SAAS builder or custom development, always ask about the limitations you may encounter during the customization of a marketplace built with SAAS.

For example, besides the standard version Sharetribe offers an open-source self-hosted version of the platform you can customize and extend.. However, it doesn’t mean that you can include any features you want, as each architecture has its limitations. We have done a small research and prepared a short list of Sharetribe open-source version limitations.

Limited payment methods

Sharetribe doesn't have PayPal enabled on open-source version. If you want to use Paypal, you have to build your own PayPal Integration (for this, you have to contact PayPal directly and sign an agreement with them.)

No multi-currency support

Sharetribe supports only one currency per marketplace.

Location search is not available

There is no option to help your users find products or services near them.

No reviews for offline transactions

The whole transaction process (including reviews) is connected to the payment process. So there is no review system to the non-monetary transactions. Sellers need to receive PayPal payments to get reviews from other members. It means that if you want to create a P2P marketplace with no payment gateway, users will not be able to leave reviews.

Limited segmentation opportunities

No possibility to select % fee based on the customer group. The configuration allows setting only straight fee.

No availability management

No possibility to manage the calendar of service providers.

No native app development

Sharetribe has a responsive website, which works well on mobile devices. You can wrap its layout inside a native app. However, Sharetribe doesn’t offer official iPhone, Android, and other mobile apps.

Sharetribe is not the only example like this. Remember to ask about all limitations no matter what marketplace builder you choose.

You become dependent on the platform and technology it uses

In any case, when you build your marketplace app on a platform, you become dependent on its rules. If you want to build a highly scalable business, you should fully own your product and have a control over its all aspects.

What are the benefits of custom development?

If you want to build a marketplace of an enterprise level, consider custom development. In such a way you gain freedom in choosing a technology stack, features, integrations, and work model. Usually, custom marketplace development includes the following stages:

Usually, a lot of software development companies offer concept development for startup projects, as well for those, who need to launch a new version of a product. Here is what concept development includes:

Business analysis

During this stage, you get a market and target audience analysis, get assistance in competitors analysis and defining your value proposition. As a result, you get a detailed description of your target customers, their challenges, and goals. When all these are set, the wireframes or prototypes are created.

Wireframes and prototyping

Wireframing stage will help you to create a sketch of your product, define and improve its navigation and most crucial elements before it goes into production. It will help you to study each component of your marketplace and its influence on user experience. As a result, you win at getting feedbacks even before you push your product onto the market. A great way to eliminate risks and reach a market fit!

Project estimation

With wireframes and detailed requirements “in the bag”, you will receive more exact project estimation.

UX/UI services, consulting on design

UX/UI services include research and analysis, user interface prototyping, UI design and development, and usability testing. It helps you to ensure that your product is easy and pleasant to interact with.

Testing, QA support, maintenance

Custom development includes constant performance, design, and functionality testing, as well as further maintenance of your marketplace website.

Wrapping Up

The most important takeaway from this article is to think twice before deciding the best way to create an online marketplace. When choosing a ready-made solution, research everything about it and find out whether it will suit your needs when your product will scale. If you build a marketplace with unique features and business model, it is better to decide on custom development, which gives you more freedom and confidence in the product you own.

Are your product is already on the market for some time and you have
no idea how to expand it even more? Here’s an eBook ‘How To Grow Your
Online Marketplace From MVP to Enterprise?’ which will help you to learn
how to gain larger and relevant users database for your B2B, B2C or C2C
marketplace project. We’ve prepared the material in which we’ll unveil the
following points:

MVP product which you've already presented on the market but don’t
know where to move next. In this part, we consider what are the
stages of startup development and what are the signs which point out that your project is more than the startup now?

Reasons why you’re still on the MVP stage. What can possibly lag
you behind? How can you cross that ‘startup status’ stage?

How to build an online marketplace which would include the
must-have functionality for your users (and even a little bit
more)? How to scale your marketplace features and customers
database at the same time?

What are 3rd party integrations you might find necessary for your
marketplace platform? Why are integrations important?

We’ve crafted this PDF in hope that it will assist you with your business
endeavors moving your web/mobile marketplace platform from MVP to
enterprise. Why not download it then ;)?

In today's hectic life a lot of parents scratch their heads about how to engage their kids and organize their after-school leisure time. Sometimes they find it difficult to sort all the information out and choose the best activity for their child, as well as control its attendance and manage schedule on the go.

Class and activity booking app is a real rescue for both families and activity providers. Let’s dig deeper and check all the ins and outs of creating a marketplace for booking children's activities.

What is the concept of class management and booking app for kids

To understand the idea of a class and activity booking app, consider it as a marketplace, that connects parents with activity providers.

In short, parents register in the application, fill in information about their children, and with the help of various filters find and book relevant activities nearby. Activity providers, in their turn, describe their activities, organize and manage their schedule, get requests, and track analytics about the attendance.

What are the benefits of such applications?

Parents can manage and improve their children's leisure time, provide them with the best experiences and unleash their talents

Activity providers (such as creative studios, communities, schools, workshops) have an access to the wide audience and a great chance to market their classes

Parents are quickly informed about local activities for their kids, which saves their time on searching

Children can also choose the classes they want to attend and share them with friends

Review of successful apps for booking kids activities

Yuggler boasts to be the most popular mobile app for families with a great number of downloads in the App Store (the most popular app in Lifestyle/Family section). It became an honoree of Webby Awards (as the best app for parents) and got Parents’ Choice Approved Award.

The story of this project started in 2013, when two brothers realized that there was no mobile app for finding interesting activities for children in the nearest locations or other cities. Their solution was to create a community for connecting families with activity providers and giving children a wide choice of new experiences.You can read the exciting story about their journey to success right here.

Here are the main benefits of Yuggler for parents, children, and vendors.

Discover relevant activities for children of all ages with the help of matching algorithms and wide amount of filters.

Hoop was launched in 2016 in London. It is a family app that helps parents find and book activities for children under the age of 11. The founder of the app struggled wih going through a number of listings and websites or reading posters and flyers to find activities for children. That's how he came up with the idea to create an event booking app for kids.

Here is how Hoop is different

It focuses on children from 1 to 11 years old

Parents can compare ratings and reviews as well as share theirs

Families can book directly with Hoop and get the lowest price for activity

What about activity providers?

Here is what they get:

Activity timetable, where they can add and manage activities

Activity pages with descriptions, prices, locations, and photos to build their own brand

Kidpass is a membership-based online marketplace for parents, where they can explore and book different activities for their kids.

The marketplace offers parents three subscription plans: basic, family, and power. Each plan contains a certain number of activity credits per month that can be used to book any activity.

That's what the co- founder of Kidpass has told in a recent interview:

“[The use of credits] allows us to charge varying prices to the parents depending on the activity’s cost to make sure that parents get a great deal, while ensuring that the unit economics work well for us as a marketplace supporting both businesses and families,” explains Liou. “We have had positive gross margins as a business because of our business model, and we intentionally avoided any unlimited plans that could be highly unprofitable,”

The highlight of this app is that parents receive credits for different activities, so their children are not tied to the certain one. They can try and change different classes, until they find the one that is the most interesting for them.

Sawyer is a software platform for kid classes. Their “highlight” is a subscription-based software called Sawyer tools.

It is a scheduling, payment, and communication cloud-based software for class providers, where they can organize schedules, market their activities, get reporting and attendance statistics, send updates to parents, and network with industry experts and providers.

As for parents, they can easily find and book activities for their children, read reviews about the providers, and pay directly via Sawer.

How a marketplace for finding and booking childrens' activities works. Main features.

Let's see the list of the main features you need to include in your class booking app.

For parents

Advanced search

First and foremost parents need to find relevant activities for their kids.

Don’t make your users surf through a large number of different activities and spend a lot of time on classifying and sorting them. Try to provide your clints with the most advanced and specific search to find the best ever activity for their kid.

Here are some ideas on how to organize the search on your website:

Sophisticated filters

Most widely used are the filters by activity category, type, location, age, cost, and duration. You can go further and add such filters as season, weather conditions, and gender, etc. as, for example, Yuggler does.

Hashtags

Adding hashtags to classify each activity will help parents and kids sort everything out and find exactly what they need.

Push notifications about new activities for kids

Customized push notifications will help parents stay tuned for the new activities happening in their area. Let the parents choose what notifications they want to get and how often. Yuggler, for example, allows users to select the type of activity, region, gender, and age, and then receive only relevant notifications.

Bookmark interesting activities

When scrolling through different activities, give your clients ability to bookmark those that interest them most.

Ratings

Submitting reviews about the activities will help other users to make a choice. Provide both ratings and reviews to make sure parents get enough information about the quality of the class. Later on, based on the reviews, you can create a Top Rated section with the most popular activities.

Top charts with activities according to users' criteria

Yuggler, for example, has developed an algorithm that enables scoring of activities based on community actions. These top charts are fully interactive, so users can construct their own top lists. Great feature, isn’t it?

Instant communication

Keep your users on the same page by providing them with messaging feature. In such a way, activity providers can send updates and reminders to parents or children, communicate with each other or their staff.

Calendar for kids activities

In today's busy world, parents may find it difficult to remember about their children's activities. A calendar with their kid’s schedule will help them to have all information on fingertips and never forget to walk a child to the football class.

Reminders

Parents will be more than grateful if they can receive reminders about the upcoming activity or any changes in schedule.

For activity providers

Activity providers, including both individuals and companies, need an all-in-one tool to market their services, keep all their schedules, reports, and other documents in one place. Here are some ideas on what features you can provide them with to hit the mark.

Reporting

Reporting is a very useful feature when it comes to tracking revenue, activity views, attendance, and engagement. It will help activity providers find their weak points and improve the service.

Provide vendors with a dashboard, where they can put and manage all their schedulings, set flexible prices, availability, and adjust it to different holidays or day-offs.

Business model and monetization. How to make profit from your activity booking marketplace

Membership plans

Membership plans on your marketplace are a great way to reward your users with different discounts, packages, and loyalty programs. In addition, membership strengthens the relationships between the users and gives service providers a chance to get more loyal customers.

One of the methods to monetize your platform is to offer premium membership plans for a certain fee. For example, Sawyer enables vendors to create custom membership packages, where parents can subscribe to their activities and get different discounts and perks.

When you have already got a solid base of users, you can include paid (“bonus”) features to make their user experience more vivid. Here are some of the features your users can purchase:

Reminders about the upcoming activities (for parents)

Bigger amount of listings (for activity providers)

Access to more activities with discounts (for parents)

Boosted listings

Boosted listings may become a great marketing tool for activity providers, that will bring them more customers and profit. Boosted listings are shown to families more often and get your services in front of more people. For example, Hoop offers two ways to boost the listings:

Enable in-app booking

Enable free trials on an activity

Meanwhile, they charge organizers 10% + VAT on bookings made via the platform.

If you choose free trials, Hoop will invoice you each month for the free trial request.

Wrapping up

The market for events and activities booking apps is not crowded yet. There are a lot of opportunities for growth, especially on the local level. Parents need more all-in-one platforms, where they can book activities, receive reminders, read reviews, and manage the schedule of their children on the go.

Activity providers, in their turn, can market their offers, track the attendance statistics, grow their customer base and improve the service. It seems to be a win-win solution for both parties, doesn’t it?

If you’re engaged in digital business, you're probably aware that to produce
the world-known project, you should sweat well not only on its technical
realization but take into consideration its business logic too. In this
article, we’ll unveil what is so special about the creation of online
marketplace business plan.

We offer you to check out how to develop online marketplace business model
canvas and the answers to 'how to monetize a marketplace platform?' question.

Let’s consider marketplace model examples. How is each marketplace platform
business model unique and different?

Currently, the marketplace world revolves around 3 major business
types, which are B2B (business-to-business), B2C (business-to-community),
and C2C/P2P (peer-to-peer).

Online marketplace business plan for B2B, B2C or C2C solutions might be
different. Let’s see why.

First of all, for building a B2B or B2C or C2C platform, you should learn a
particular marketplace model example meticulously. For instance,

B2B audience - there’s always a supplier and a
manufacturer/producer. A manufacturer and a supplier can list on a
single platform and offer their services. It usually works like
this:

B2C - a company/organization which offers their product(s) directly
to the end user

C2C - users can buy and sell things from each other

If we drill a bit deeper, we find out that marketplace types can be divided
to horizontal (marketplaces of universal scope, where we can buy and sell
anything, i.e. Alibaba, Amazon,etc.) and vertical (niche-oriented,
single-focused, i.e. Hertz, Booking.com). Below we can see the examples of
several popular marketplace solutions:

The ‘startline’ is where you determine what kind of marketplace platform
you want. Is it supposed to be B2B or B2C or C2C project?

What we’re going to do, is to draft a simple online marketplace business
plan for the P2P web/mobile shared economy solution. This is a two-sided
marketplace platform where the users can offer comic book rarities to
exchange or sell.

First, we determine the category of people we create our
marketplace model example for.

- Adult comic book enthusiasts and readers who want to sell, exchange the
specific comic book issue or the entire collections between each other

- Original authors and/or artists of comic books, who want to showcase and
sell their own already written, drawn, printed, and published works.

Several ideas on what customers’ demands we should fulfill to make
our product more ‘distributive’

(note: this is just a sample, so we recommend to not take it too seriously
:) )

We can get a better picture of how to monetize our marketplace project by
detecting our users’ needs, first of all.

Comic book enthusiasts and readers

- I should have the opportunity to establish my own reader’s profile via different methods. Add comics collections and attachments effortlessly, preview them, browse other readers’ profiles and get the preview of their comic book collections.

- I need a worldwide platform, where I can sell and ship my comic book issues to other comic book enthusiasts like me

- I need a worldwide platform, where I can exchange my comic book issues to the comic books other users have listed on their profile

- I need a marketplace platform, which would supply me with different payment and shipping options

- I need to be available to store and read the purchased or exchanged comic book in my collection/archive for unlimited number of days

- Analytics to monitor my earnings, purchases and views.

- Chatroom and messaging options to make connections

- I need to see pricing options of your platform, to determine which one fits my needs

- 'Comic book near me' - look for various comic book shops/events near you.

Comics authors and artists

- I want to be signed in as an original comic book author and comic book distributor/seller

- I need to enlist my creation in your platform to offer it for purchase to the comic book readers

- Various payment receiving options would be great

- Analytics is a must have to browse my profile views and selling stats.

Now, what is the functionality that can satisfy our customers’
needs?

Ability to choose between profile types: you
can create the ‘reader’ profile to list your
comic books rarities for selling and for the
exchange. Or if you’re a comic book author, you
can create the ‘author’ profile and start
selling and showcasing your comic books.

GPS and tracking functionality for such
features: ‘comic book near me’ and for finding
comic books related events

Pricing plans for each user category

Author’s rights protection and impossible comic
book leakage

As you can see crafting the well-detailed online marketplace business plan
can help us foresee the scope of our product’s distribution.

How to monetize a marketplace project? App monetization strategy and ideas
for B2B, B2C, or C2C solutions

Here are several online marketplace revenue models that would help you earn
money on your project.

Let’s consider P2P marketplace app monetization strategy for our comic
books exchange, buy, and sell platform. We’ve chosen to implement 3 Pricing
Plans, one of which is Free plan, the second is extended for readers, and
the last one is for comic book authors. Next, the user has to pay or
upgrade to the specific pricing plan to get access to such special
features, as:

Cloud storage where you can keep your purchased comics for the
unlimited number of days

When you apply a certain online marketplace revenue model, remember that it
should be based on such factors:

Monitor your customer’s preferences, level of interest, and
attitude towards your product. Create questionnaires, A/B testing,
introduce beta features to try. Based on the collected results,
think of how your users can get even more from your marketplace
platform.

Follow the trends but at the same time stay true to your own
uniqueness. Want it or not, but people will always follow trends.
You can be a certain trend follower too. Or you can start your own
mainstreamy thing that people will monitor and follow.

Visit your industry-related events and make new connections

Mix up several revenue models and see what your customers’ response
will be

Summary:

We hope that this article and C2C marketplace app development extended
example have helped you to clarify how to monetize an app idea and line up
more clearly an online marketplace business plan. Determine the direction
towards which your marketplace should move, think about the people you’re
creating your solution for and get it going.

Online marketplace development is hard. Moreover, building successful and scalable marketplaces, that become a legend in your niche is a real challenge.

You need to get your hands dirty.

However, if you follow the main strategies and think three steps ahead, things become easier.

In this article, you will find useful tips on how to build a marketplace app from customer development and market segmentation to MVP creation and scaling your marketplace.

Ready to jump in?

How to determine a demand for your marketplace app

Comprehend the problems your customers face

Before pushing your product into the market, ensure that this is exactly what your audience needs. It may sound obvious, but most of the startups ignore this stage and shoot in the dark instead.

According to CBInsights, the number one reason for startups failure is no market need for their solution.

Let's review an example of real-life marketplace failure, that proves the fact above.

Hello Parking is one of the marketplaces, that has suffered from the rose-colored spectacles view at the target market.

This was the marketplace for sharing parking spaces with people in need. The main reason for their shutdown was building the product the audience doesn't need.

The co-founders of Hello Parking said:

“The truth is, that we huddled together to decide on ideas that sounded nice, built prototypes, put on our salesman hats, and didn’t understand why we weren’t closing deals. We have never defined clear hypotheses, developed experiments, and we’ve rarely had meaningful conversations with our target end-users. And while we’ve had some wonderful advisors in the parking industry, we should have met with everyone we could get our hands on”.”

Another problem they’ve faced was the inability to scale up. As it has turned out, a number of people who have looked for parking places exceeded those who actually wanted to share them.

Conduct a customer development

When it comes to marketplaces, customer development gains even more importance. You have to concentrate on both supply and demand side. This means you have to conduct customer development for each of them.

The basic rules of the customer development are:

Make assumptions related to your product

Build hypothesis about the problem

Validate hypothesis

Generate or validate your ideas

Let's imagine that you are building a marketplace app for HR managers and employees. Here are some examples of questions you can ask while doing customer development for your marketplace.

What are the problems you face when looking for employees/job?

What could be done to improve your experience with recruitment/application for a job?

What product do you wish you had that will simplify your hiring/job application process?

What do you like/dislike about the current solutions on the market?

What do you think about (your solution)?

How does this solution solve your problems and does it actually solve them?

How would you improve this product?

Please, note that the question number five will give you the most important hint and show you whether the game is worth the candle.

Many startup founders assume that the aim of customer development is to ensure that people will buy your product. However, this is a blind spot. First of all, customer development has to give you the confidence that your product solves the problems of your target audience.

The lesson from Dinnr - same day ingredient delivery marketplace suits here best.

The survey before product launch has shown that 70 percent of 250 target market respondents would buy the product.

“So on the first day, we stacked the veggies and herbs, bought from wholesalers (not from supermarkets, pah! We were taking advantage of economies of scale!). We expected a torrent of orders.
The torrent ended up being a trickle and we got knocked out of La-La land back into reality. On the first day, we had exactly… three orders. 12 orders in the first week.”

Let's get back to our example with job board marketplace. What is the main takeaway from the customer development?

In this case, it is to ensure that frustration with not convenient solutions for recruitment/job application is strong enough to buy your product.

Your aim is to learn as much as possible about your customers’ past experience and find their pain points. Next step is to learn whether they can go with it or if they really need another solution.

Analyze your competitors

Know your competitors' strength and weaknesses even better than yours. Stay tuned for their progress and updates. When analyzing your competitors, mind the following data.

During the stage of customer development, ask your potential clients how they would like to improve the current products on the market. This is what can give you an idea of your unique value proposition.

Remember, a value proposition is not about increasing the number of features or decreasing the price. The goal is to find the core of your customers' problems, something that impedes their efficiency at work or leisure. Ask your audience how they try to solve this problem. If they haven't tried anything yet, it means that this is not a serious problem and they can easily ignore it. If they can ignore it, your marketplace will not become a silver bullet.

Your product should stand out among competitors and divide your customers’ life into “before and after buying your product”.

Define your product goals

Planning is everything. Set measurable and real goals your product has to achieve within a particular timeframe.

Make sure that you are scaling gradually.

Why does this matter?

According to Startup Genome Project, 74 percent of high-growth internet startups fail due to premature scaling. This means that companies spend too many resources on customer acquisition, hiring sales team, marketing campaigns, adding new features, and building offices before reaching a product/market fit.

When building product goals, don't overdo. Grow your marketplace app only when you have reached KPIs that indicate the market fit.

These are some of the factors that prove this fact:

You understand the problems of your customers and know how to solve them

You have settled on the market and found your target audience

You have created a word of mouth for your product

You have already got a base of satisfied customers

Your product brings revenue

You have a stable business model

Your customers can tell the benefits of your product for them and problems it solves

Business model for your marketplace platform

Marketplace business model is the most important aspect that can scale or destroy your business. Most of the marketplaces fail because of the unclear business model, that attracts only one side of your platform or doesn't bring a desired profit.

A business model is a strategic plan that serves as a pillar for successful and profitable performance of an organization. The heart of any business model is your audience.

Usually business model covers one or several groups of customers. That's why for more effective customer service, divide your audience into separate segments.

Let's dig deeper into it.

Customer and market segmentation

You can divide your customers into segments in the following cases:

If they have different requests, and, as a result, you need to provide different offers for each of them

You need different marketing channels to reach them

They need different kinds of business relationships

Their profitability significantly varies

Let's say you build on-demand ingredient delivery marketplace. In this case, you can divide your customers into following segments:

Individual buyers

Wholesalers

Supermarkets

Restaurant owners

Your task is to create a strong value proposition for each of these segments and choose the best marketing channels for reaching them.

Attracting users to both supply and demand side of your marketplace should be your number one priority. Like in domino, if one of the channels fails, it will directly influence others.

Let's get back to the example with ingredients delivery marketplace. Here are some examples of distribution channels for this type of marketplace:

Sales via own website

Partner shops and restaurants

Small retailers

Websites managed by third parties

Try out different channels and find what works best for your e-marketplace. Keep a balance between different distribution channels and find the effective combination, that brings clients and revenue.

Create the list of revenue channels

Ask yourself what your clients are ready to pay for. The right answer will help you to create one or several revenue channels from each of the customer segments.

Here are some of the main revenue channels you can use:

Payment for use

Subscription

Pay for rent/leasing

Asset sales

Advertisement

Commission from the sales

Try to come up with as much revenue channels as possible. In case one of the channels quits, you can always turn to another one.

Building MVP for your marketplace website

How to choose features for your marketplace

MVP is all about building a product with basic functionality, that will allow you to test it on the market. Instead of stuffing your marketplace with ”nice to have” features, add only those ones your users consider relevant.

Prioritize your features and choose the most important among them. Don`t deviate from your strategy and scale your product only after you've ensured to reach a market/product fit. Pay attention to the following KPIs and analytics:

Data for service providers

Number of buyers per day/month/year

Activity tracking per day/month/year

Customer liquidity (probability that a visit will lead to transaction)

Profit by countries/cities

Repeat purchase ratio

Revenue from buyers

Number of orders per buyer

Analysis of customer segments

Market conditions and trends

Data for marketplace owner

Number of listings on the marketplace

Listing growth rate

Provider liquidity (percentage of listings that lead to transactions)

Total sales value of the products or services sold via your marketplace

Tracking the steps a user takes before buying

Customer acquisition cost (how much money you spend on new customer e.g. customer support or paid ads)

Seller growth rate

Revenue by location, market, acquisition channel or time

Take rate (percentage of the Gross Merchandise Value retained by your marketplace)

Scaling your marketplace

After you have reached a market fit, created a word of mouth for your business and gathered a user base, it`s time to grow.

Here is how you can do it.

Go multiplatform

According to the ComScore, most users go multiplatform in comparison with users that are mobile or desktop only.

Developing a mobile app for your marketplace will make your users’ experience more smooth and bring you more users.

Here are some of the examples of third-party integrations you can add:

Marketing and statistics

Payment system integration

Email marketing software

GPS tracking

CRM

Chat/messaging software

Build a community around your idea

One of the ways to create a dedicated community around your marketplace is storytelling.

You can create a blog and engage your users to write about their experience on your platform. For example, if it is car rental marketplace, your users can write about their adventures and trips. If it's food ingredients delivery platform, engage them to share different recipes. Believe me, there is always a scope for imagination!

Partner with other businesses

Partnership with other businesses is a win-win solution that will help you to reach a wider audience. For example, if you have bike sharing marketplace, you can partner with bike shops allowing them to access the community of renters and make revenue from unsold bikes.

Organize events

Event organization is another nice way to unite people around the idea of your online marketplace. Contests, loyalty programs, and even theme parties will make your audience feel a part of a large community.

Conclusion

Now you are all set and armed with the basic knowledge to build a successful marketplace. In the positive sense of that word, be meticulous about each detail and aspect of your platform. Build scalable marketplaces that have a space for improvement and always keep in mind your buyer persona. Only in such a way you will reach the desired success!

Fake it till you make it. You are probably familiar with this expression, which means that if you want to get something you should act like it is already in the bag.

But what if we look at this from another angle? Imagine that you plan to create a two-sided marketplace, but have a vague idea about how your audience will perceive it.

In such a way, you can “fake” that you have already created it, show how navigation looks like, how the content and elements are placed and gather first feedbacks. This is when wireframing comes to help.

In this article, you will learn about the main benefits of using wireframes before developing a marketplace.

Ready to jump in?

Concept development. What it is and why it matters

Marketplaces are multi-sided platforms, that require well-thought-out business logic and intuitive user experience.

At Apiko, concept development is the first and essential stage in the software development process.

It serves as a pillar of your product. If you don’t take it seriously or omit important details, your project may falter on further stages.

Why does concept development matter?

During this stage, you gain insights into your target audience, their problems, and desires. After this, you build a roadmap for your project, create wireframes and prototypes, gather feedbacks, improve, and iterate until you ensure that this is exactly what your users need.

Without concept development, you risk creating a product that will not reach a market fit.

Usually, concept development consists of two iterations: business analysis and wireframes/prototypes creation. These two iterations are interconnected, so one is meaningless without the other one. An effective business analysis will help you to create detailed wireframes, analyze them, and gather first feedbacks.

So, first let's see what main goals of business analysis are.

Find out product goals and requirements

The main aim of business analysis is to find the problem your product solves. Based on this, build the requirements for your project and its main functionality.

Create value proposition

Value proposition is a unique angle of your project which makes you different from your competitors and recognizable between your audience. Value proposition should express benefits your customers get when using your products or services.

Get insights into what your users expect to get from your application

Business analysis will help you to learn what your audience wants to achieve with the help of your product. This is actually what makes them spend time on it. Your aim is to ensure that you are on the same page with your customers and that your product will satisfy their needs. Learn what is the main aim of your users and how your product can help them achieve it.

The main takeaway from this concept development stage is a clear portrait of your target customers, their challenges and goals.

When you have all this in your mind, you can proceed to creating wireframes.

Wireframing before marketplace development. Benefits for business owners

Wireframes serve as a magic wand that turns your ideas and assumptions into real facts you can work with. Wireframes help you сonvey a concept of your project to your potential customers, change and improve it with minimum waste of time and costs. Here is what you can do with the help of wireframes:

Define your product navigation

You can show your stakeholders and potential customers how navigation elements will be placed and discuss their usability. What is the benefit? You will learn if there are enough items in your navigation (or too many), what items you need to add, what buttons are less visible, and if it is clear for the user where to move next.

Focus on analytical viewpoint of your product

What is great about wireframes is that users can entirely focus on your website layout and navigational elements, without being distracted with colors. It helps to see the product from analytical perspective and analyze its usability.

Get insights about what features your customers find to be the most useful

Sometimes the products are stuffed with features, users have no need in. With the help of wireframes, you can see what functionality is the must-have and what can be omitted on this stage.

Minimize rework, save time and money

It is much easier to redo and edit wireframes than make changes in already developed product. Wireframing stage will help you to minimize rework, validate and improve the product idea, and come to the development company with exact requirements.

Study each component of your marketplace, its influence on user experience and interaction with other components

Wireframes give you a great chance to study each element of your website separately, play with it, change its position or size. Then, you can do the same with other elements and see how they all fit into the whole picture.

Get feedbacks at an early stage

This is actually the salt of the wireframes. Instead of explaining your idea in words, you can show the ready sketches to your users/stakeholders and gather first feedbacks and reviews. Here are some of the questions you can ask:

Is the registration process simple enough?

Is the navigation convenient for you?

What do you expect to get by clicking on this button?

What fields do you find to be redundant?

What do you expect to see on this page?

What elements are confusing you?

What interactive elements and fields would you like to add?

Are the CTA buttons strong enough?

What, in your opinion, are the key elements (pages) in the application?

Are the filters convenient for you? What other filters would you like to see?

Receive more accurate and detailed project estimation

With wireframes on hand, you will have clear requirements and specifications to ensure that you are on the same page with the development team.

Examples of wireframes and their impact on overall project success

We’ve decided to show you the examples of wireframes Apiko has created for a car rental marketplace.

Let’s start from the “Find Car” page.

When you show it to your customers, you may find out that they need more fields to find a right car.

The same goes with the filters.

You may learn that your users require more filtering and sorting options. You can also find out what your customers prefer more: drop-down fields, range filters, map or list view, etc.

Now let's see the structure of “Rent a car” page.

After showing the wireframes, you may find out that your users need to see more information about the car or that they also need a map with its location.

Conclusion

To wrap it up, wireframing benefits go far beyond just having a rough sketch of your website with its main elements.

Here are just some of the benefits you get when using wireframes:

Define and improve your product navigation

Analyze the analytical viewpoint of your product

Get insights about the features most important for your users

Minimize rework, save time and money

Analyze each component of your product and its interaction with other elements

Get first feedbacks

Wireframing is an efficient tool for gaining insights about your audience and discovering what their expectations are. Such approach will not only save your time and money but also help you jump into your customers minds and customize your product to their needs.

When building a marketplace startup or the shared economy project aimed at enterprise level, there emerge dozens of decisions to make. One of which is: how to build a marketplace platform and what to choose? Outsource for the marketplace developers team or rely your project on online, SAAS-type marketplace app builders?

Here we’ll consider 2 primary ways of how to create an online marketplace. Let’s measure the
scope of pros and cons for both development methods.

What type of online marketplace platform are you aiming at?

The very first thing you need to do is to decide what kind of buy and sell
platform you want. Is it supposed to be an online marketplace for sellers? A B2B, B2C, or P2P marketplace platform development? Are you wondering how to build a
marketplace app, that is a cross-platform solution?

Before you get to the development process, we recommend you to create the business plan
for your online marketplace platform which would answer the following
questions 🤔:

What industry should it work for? Is it a unique product or are there
competitors already?

Who is it created for? What does my project have to
offer? How will it solve my customer’s pains?

What marketing + distribution techniques will work the best to create an online marketplace that would be on everyone's lips?

How can I monetize the project? What are the possible ways to earn
money on it?

The current marketplace app builder tool was launched by Antti Virolainen
and Juho Makkonen in 2011. The very concept of the solution is to let
people build, manage, and maintain a P2P buy and sell platform created on
their own.

First, Sharetribe gives you a 30-day trial to check out the features of the
chosen pricing plan. Then you can make your decision whether to start your
own online marketplace using the current solution, or look for other
marketplace app builders.

The primary advantage of these DIY solutions is that you can set up a neat
marketplace with no coding skills at all. You'll receive basic functionality out of
the box. Such solutions usually include drag-n-drop, WYSIWYG features, and work the best for building small-to-medium marketplace projects/startups.

How about the scale of customization ?

The drawback of such builders is that you lose the opportunities to customize your online
marketplace platform the way you want. Let us provide several examples for you:

- You want to start your own online marketplace in your
country, where apart from PayPal or Stripe, people
prefer other payment systems
, like Klarna, Skrill, or iDeal (in the Netherlands) only.

- Or let’s consider another example, where you want to implement different
types of notifications (i.e. SMS alerts, email, and push notifications) for
your online marketplace platform or sharing economy app at once.

If you create an online marketplace of enterprise level...

Online marketplace app builder is surely not enough. You need to understand
that enterprise marketplaces require way more extended functionality than
startups or MVPs.

First of all due to the fact that they’re crafted for a large number
of visitors/users, the appropriate front-end/back-end technologies
should be applied, that also work well for cross-platforms
multi-sided marketplace development.

Large products should be constantly supported, maintained, and
tested by a team of in-house or outsourced developers.

Owners of medium-to-large solutions might be in the constant rush
to implement new one-of-their-kind features. Thus, they need a relible tech team to get the work done correctly.

If you've chosen custom development of sharing economy apps/platforms, you should know that the prices here depend on a lot of aspects: the range of features you plan to implement, design work, R&D, etc. Thus, the process might get costly enough, sometimes.

The aim of this online marketplace platform is to connect people through
the food ritual in a warm homelike atmosphere. The app allows you to
arrange some kind of ‘meal parties’ right at your home and invite your friends or complete
strangers to have nice conversation and time.

The scope of work we were responsible for:

What solution should I choose in the end?

In case you’re wondering how to build a marketplace platform, not a heavily
customized one, which you’d like to support and handle on your own, go
ahead and try SAAS-builders.

If you’re about to create an online marketplace solution of enterprise level (B2B or B2C solution especially), DIY
platforms might be not enough, since as we’ve stated above, the bigger the product is, the more complex organization and more resources it requires. But, at
the same time, large B2B, B2C online marketplace platforms should be
intuitive in use for the end users.

Letgo is a peer-to-peer e-commerce marketplace platform that allows users to buy from, sell to and chat with others locally. It's an ambitious startup that broke into the market with the intention to become the largest second-hand marketplace in the world. Recently, it has raised
$175 million
to invest in growth plans and grab market share from Ebay and Craigslist. It is a perfect case of how a recently created startup has all chances to beat old players on the market.

In this article, we will review primary Letgo features and functions, its advantages over competitors and main techniques that will help you to build an mobile marketplace app like Letgo.

What Letgo is and why it is popular

Letgo is considered to be one of the main rivals of such large e-commerce corporations as eBay or Craigslist. The central concept of this app is to connect local people who want to sell or buy used stuff on the fly. It also allows users to communicate with each other and schedule a meeting. The application is completely free, and you don't have to pay any fee or cut of the sale price.

Letgo market

According to
DMR statistics, 300,000 used items on Letgo are posted daily and 100,000 items are purchased. As we have found, the average price of an item on Letgo is ~$50. So, Letgo operates financial flows that total up to 5M USD on a daily basis (estimated cost of items that are being sold every day), and the potential volume of operations is 15M (total cost of items that are being added daily). Impressive, isn’t it? Especially, in a niche that is entirely taken by major players like eBay and Craigslist.

Letgo is also expanding geographically. As for now, it is available in more than 25 countries. Most of its users are in the USA and Canada. Besides, it is tested in Asia and Latin America.

How does Letgo work?

Letgo app is pretty simple to use. Let's discuss its main features.

Registration

After you have downloaded the app from Google Play Store, you can log in via Facebook or e-mail.

Congratulations, you are registered!

Selling

After the registration, it will bring you to the screen with a camera where you can take a photo of the product you need to sell. The system has a built-in artificial intelligence that automatically recognizes your product and the category it belongs to. Then, you have to write the price of your product or indicate that the item is free.

That`s all! Your product is published, and now you will receive messages and offers from buyers. If needed, you can edit your product's description or price later. You can also see how many people watched your product by tapping the item for sale in your profile, selecting the “more info” button and see the number of views near the eye symbol.

Buying

The app automatically shows you the items for sale in your area. When you open the drag down menu, you will see the options to filter the products according to location, category or posting date. By clicking on the photo, you get the description of the product and chat icon where you can write a message to the seller.

Payment Integration

Letgo app doesn't handle payments - they happen outside the platform, and, as a result, the payment process is not protected (you can't receive a refund or make a complaint). That’s why it is recommended to give cash in person.

Main competitors of Letgo

Letgo is the only marketplace with image recognition and artificial intelligence. Up to this day, its main competitors according to CBInsights are Offerup, 5miles, and Carousell. These companies have recently picked up a lot of investments and have all chances to perform better than such old players as eBay and Craigslist. Let's review the main advantages of Letgo compared with these competitors.

Letgo vs Craigslist

LetGo is faster to use and users don't have to scan the product
descriptions and spend a lot of time on finding the right product

There is no built-in chat in Craigslist whereas in LetGo people can
communicate within the app

Descriptions of the product are optional

You don't have to confirm the listing on your e-mail, your product
is published automatically

LetGo vs eBay

eBay takes 10% cut of your sale

eBay has big competition so it is harder to sell something

LetGo is more local, so it is easier to find your customer

The main advantages of Letgo comparing to other online marketplaces:

mobile approach, modern and user -friendly interface;

geotagging and other localizing features that automatically list
the products according to your location;

artificial intelligence and image recognition that saves time and
makes buying and selling easy and fast;

ability to verify your account using Facebook profile;

active on some overseas markets including Turkey and Norway

completely free

Alec Oxford,
the Letgo founder, said “Our competitors by now should probably know that we will do whatever it takes to win. It's not like we're operating under disguise. We're completely visible, and it's working, no?" And we should confirm, that it is definitely working.

Monetization of Letgo. How does Letgo make money?

Many people wonder how Letgo makes money. The answer is that at this stage the app doesn't make money from its services. In future, the founders of the app plan to monetize the platform by adding paid functions. Here are the ways how you can make a profit from the similar app:

integrate in-app payments and take a percentage of each sale

introduce paid visual ads with opportunity to promote your posts

charge for additional product description

limit a number of items that can be posted for free

How Letgo works:Technology stack

Now let's review what technologies are used in Letgo. We have monitored the open vacancies in Letgo and the Linkedin profiles of their developers to find out its tech stack.

As you can see from the above, the developers of LetGo app use Express.js, React.js and MySQL to build the web application.

The application for iOS and Android is developed on native technologies Swift, Objective-C, and Java.

Here are the main advantages of these technologies:

Server Side: Express.js

Express.js is a fast and minimalist web framework for Node.js. Comparing with its competitor Django,
Express is leading in top 10K sites, top 100K sites, top 1M sites and the entire web. Also, in comparison with Ruby on Rails, Express.js has faster server load and boot time. It also has the biggest community compared to all frameworks of Node.js. It is minimalist, flexible and easy to monitor. Express.js is a great choice for mobile apps, as it is fast on the server and, as a result, your app is more dynamic.

Client Side: React.js

React.js is a large JavaScript library used for building the view for the user. One of the React.js advantages comparing to its competitors is one-way data binding. It means that the flow of data is going in one direction, so it is easy to control and change it. Additionally, it is always clear where the data was changed and, as a result, easier to debug components of large applications, make updates and control application performance. Also, React.js is outstanding with its simplicity, making the development process faster and more effective.

Mobile

Letgo uses native technologies Swift, Objective-C, and Java for its mobile application. Native mobile applications are developed specifically for each platform: Objective-C or Swift for iOS and Java for Android.
If you want to save the development efforts, consider developing a hybrid app with the ReactNative framework like most of our clients do. One of its benefits is the reduction of development efforts. 70% of code written in ReactNative for Android version can be reused for iOS version. In contrast, when using native technologies, you have to write code from scratch for both platforms. Consequently, developing hybrid web application will simplify the maintenance of your project as you have to maintain only one ReactNative code.

How to create your own selling marketplace app like Letgo

The development of a Letgo exact clone can take a lot of time and money. And probably exact cloning is not reasonable. Letgo app is growing very rapidly with the expected amount of transactions facilitated on Letgo in 2017 of $23 billion. The estimated value of Letgo is $1.2. Billion. And this is definitely rewarding.
According to the information on the official Linkedin page, Letgo team consists of 100 employees of different nationalities that continuously improve the application features.

The most important technical aspect of Letgo is its maintenance as it has a high server load. If you want to create the similar app, it is better to start with basic functionality and server load. Let's review how much will it cost to develop such app.

How much does it cost to develop an app like Letgo?

We outlined the main features of Letgo app and the number of hours needed for their realization and here is the result.

List of features:

Register via Facebook or e-mail

View products for sale

Search products by category, price and location

Write messages to seller and buyer

View seller's profile

Buy the product

Sell the product

Edit your product for sale

Delete your product for sale

Receive in-app notifications about your listings

Invite friends from Facebook

According to our estimate, the time needed to build a similar app (both web and mobile) with these functions will range from 449 to 1019 hours, depending on the complexity of functions.

Let's review it in more detail. Below you will find the estimate of the web application. Its development will take between 98 and 231 hours.

If you decided to develop mobile application in React Native, the timeframe for will range from 150 to 340 hours. It includes hours needed both for Android and iOS platform.

Now let's consider the backend development. The backend of the application is responsible for data management, information exchange, performance, authorization, data security transfer and push notifications. The time for the development of the application's backend will take between 62 to 132 hours.

We also included hours needed for bug fixing, manual testing and management, as it also affects the price and timeline. Bug fixing was calculated by adding 25% to the total sum of hours and manual testing and management - by adding 10% to each.

The price depends on different factors as your service provider`s hourly rate and location. For example, in the US prices for app development range from $100 to $250 per hour, while in Eastern Europe where our development offices are located, you can hire a senior developer for $40-$70 per hour.

How to make your buy and sell mobile marketplace stand out

If you are set on creating the app similar to Letgo, don't make a copy of it. Create something unique and useful. Think about your potential customers and their demands. Here are some tips on how you can create unique value.

Specialize

Think about narrowing your audience and making your app more specialized.
For example, choose one category of products. This may be only sports
products or toys for children. In such case, you will know what your target
audience is and it will be easier for to create the marketing strategy.

Localize

LetGo is all about selling and buying locally and that is what makes it
unique. Think about building the app for one city or country. As a result,
you will have fewer competitors and more customers.

The most important aspect of creating any marketplace app is right planning. Before
starting the development process, take your time and think about the needs
of your future app users.

Outline the most important functions of your
application that are essential for the beginning. Speak with your clients
to learn what their needs are, and what problems they experience working
with the products you are competing with.

To conclude, building a marketplace for local sellers and buyers is not difficult from the technical side. The most important thing is to spare enough time for planning and selecting the main features needed for the start. If you plan everything right, you are halfway to the success!

B2B food industry has a lot of space for improvement when it comes to innovation, going paperless, and overall business optimization.

Let`s confess, we really need more online platforms for food service industry, where operators can connect with distributors, compare pricing, and order online without any phone calls, bunch of documents, and bothersome paperwork.

Luckily, we have innovators that move forward and strive to improve the B2B food market.

Here is the list of the useful and outstanding B2B food delivery marketplaces around the world.

TradingTable is a B2B online ordering platform for restaurant operators. It connects operators, distributors, and suppliers to simplify and speed up the process of buying and selling. Here are its main features:

For operators

Connect with distributors

Submit orders

Access real time pricing

See product info

Customize the interface

For distributors

Work with existing customers

Automated real-time pricing

Integrate your systems directly with TradingTable

Spend more time consulting with customers, delivering the information and insight they really want

For Suppliers

Showcase your entire portfolio of products

Provide operators with detailed product information on the very platform they use to order

Biolinked is a completely free B2B food platform that connects organic food suppliers with wholesale buyers around the world. It allows users to exhibit their products, promote their company, and directly communicate with potential business clients.

Haywheel is an online marketplace for artisanal foods that connects top-tier restaurants with specialty food suppliers. Users can search, book, and order asian food and wholesale ingredients from various food caterers. When you click on the product, you can read the information about the producer, delivery methods, charges, and schedule.

Haywheel also got investments from Ycombinator in 2016, which proves the usefulness of this marketplace.

Cater Nation is an online B2B food ordering marketplace that aggregates restaurants, caterers, universities, and government agencies. They also provide drop-off catering for business meetings and training sessions. The main features of this marketplace include wide variety of high quality restaurants and caterers on one website, guaranteed retail pricing, delivery and pick-up options, experienced Customer Care team, and generous reward program.

Ninjacart is India's Leading B2B agri-marketing platform that connects farmers to businesses. It allows farmers and producers to sell products directly to retail stores. With Ninjacart over 1000 farmers sell over 100 vegetable and fruit everyday to retailers and restaurants in Bangalore.

Wow, this is something really ground-breaking! GoPato is a fast-growing startup that delivers the food in Costa Rica with autonomous delivery drones. Mostly it operates with restaurants and cafes, and even partners with McDonald's . Fast and precise delivery is guaranteed.

Supp.li is an online B2B food distributor that links food producers directly with hotel, restaurant, distributor and retailer buyers. Each product on the platform is linked to the company distributor with all the necessary information about it.

B2B marketplaces are on the rise today and will continue to grow. According to the Forrester report, the U.S B2B food e-commerce market is expected to double the size of B2C e-commerce by 2020.

Every time your organization is growing bigger and more
international, there emerges the need for accurate work order management
services. For these processes, you surely need trusted enterprise asset
management software. We’ve crafted this article which is dedicated to
popular CMMS solutions review and the creation of the roadmap for enterprise application development.

Facilities work order software: purpose, target audience, and B2B model

Before we get to the 'ins-and-outs' of enterprise software development best practices, we need to figure out first what exactly work order management systems are. If we try to refer facilities work order software to any of multiple
business types, we would probably start talking about B2B model. In most
cases, facilities work order software can be or is a vital instrument for
medium-to-large business organizations and facility and maintenance
services providers. To plan the more performant facility management application roadmap example, let's pay attention to the business 'mechanism' behind it.

The model often looks like the following:

How such applications are helpful for business owners

If you want to get the most out of enterprise software development best practices, you need to analyze the benefits for both company-producer and company-supplier.

Let's start with 'producers' category. Most companies and corporations, especially the constantly growing ones,
require more engagement of both human and financial resources for better
functioning on the market. Often, such organizations request facility
management services from 3rd parties to get all the necessary, let’s say
‘householding’ work done.

If we're talking about work order service providers (cleaning, repairing
and maintenance companies, etc.), they can offer the following range of
services for companies-requestors:

Technical infrastructure

Electricity and lighting

Equipment maintenance and repair

Transportation

Dumpster rental

Cleaning services

Sewage treatment

Landscape services management

Obviously, both sides need reports on completed or planned scope of work
and pricelist. It’s the part, where facilities work order software comes
to be more than handy.

With work order management solution in sleeve, companies can:

- find and keep in touch with facility management service providers; inform
them about the required to-do’s

- track work orders, expenses, and process invoices

- manage all the asset and other document types in one system

Service providers/suppliers obtain such opportunities as to:

- find a short or long-term job

- store and expand their potential and actual customers database

- manage all the work history and payments in a single place

Must have functionality, enterprise asset management trends, and market
leaders

Before we dive in enterprise software development best practices, let's see what stats we have here. If we refer to Capterra, we can see that the resource publishes the following list of
must-have features (which is in fact, ideal for the universal-like work
order and enterprise asset management software)

CMMS software short reviews

Let’s get to know what top features solutions have to offer.

Infor
was created in 2002 and is now on the same list of the world-recognized
EAM, CMMS solutions

Infor enterprise asset management software and CMMS offers to try out a few
of so many features for your company:

Maximo by IBM is considered as one of popular facilities work order software out
here.

Maximo proposes asset operating services in combination with IoT.

The great thing about Maximo is that it has CMMS/EAM solutions for various
industries:

Maximo’s key features include:

If you want more randomness, you can check out other top solutions, among
which are:

When we’re at the stage to consider different application roadmap examples,
we start from technology preferences. Before we choose should it be React
Native/React, GraphQL, NodeJS, etc., we need to understand app’s business
logic and the general concept behind it.

Here are several suggestions:

Is it supposed to be a mobile Android + iOS application?

Should CMMSs application fetch some data?

Is facilities work order software supposed to work in a real-time
mode? What is the exact and necessary functionality that should be
present?

Tips on building a software development strategy for facility management

At Apiko, we usually keep to the workflow model, which consists of 5 main
stages:

How can these 5 steps leverage your enterprise application development
roadmap?

Step 1 - Before we proceed with your product creation, we enter a
‘concept development’ stage. This initial step helps our customer and us
draw a clearer picture of:

Product goals and requirements,

Value proposition (your customers’ pains/problems and how your
product can be of assistance),

Buyer personas, customer behavior analysis

After all the analysis-related tasks are done, we create clickable
wireframes for the work order management solution and estimate the cost of
the entire enterprise application development. When we’re talking about money, the expenses depend on
a range and the scope of features you’re planning to implement.

Step 2 - When everything from the previous stage is agreed, we help our
customer’s product obtain the fresh look and feel. We get our hands on the
complex design development, which includes UI/UX + brand identity design.

Step 3 - It’s where the very ‘juicy’ coding part begins. Here is the
specific set of features to implement (i.e. an
in-app payment solution, or a notifications mechanism). We recommend to create the implementation
plan based on the priority of a certain functionality. After each
development part is carried out, and before/after product’s release, we
proceed with a meticulous testing process.

Step 3 in details:

Step 4 - Here the ‘total testing’ part comes. At this stage, after the
CMMSs application’s release, it’s important to identify the most critical
bugs (if there are such) in a single feature or in the entire app’s
architecture, and fix them in time.

Step 5 - App’s further support and maintenance, after it has gone live is
as vital for the project concept as a heart for the human being. You need
to have reliable developers and testers team to grow your project safe and
sound after its ‘first breath.’ We consider these 5 stages as the foundation stone of software development strategy for facility and assets management.

Have you passed the ‘Release’ stage already? Spread a word about your
facilities work order software

To squeeze a bigger boost from your app, here are several tips to have in
mind:

If it’s a mobile work order management solution, place it on Google
Play market + Apple store, review platforms, like G2Crowd,
Capterra, etc.

Reach for influential people in your industry and offer them to
check out your work order management software. Make new connections
on the thematic events.

Create several pricing plans. This will help you to sort out and
understand your audience clearer.

Constantly expand the list of solutions, according to your
customers’ reviews and requests

Produce a high-quality helpful content on your website which is a
great bonus for your potential and current customers

Instead of conclusion

We hope that this article has caught your attention and answered some of your questions regarding enterprise application development. If you’re curious about
work order management app development
, check out our PDF on ‘What a Perfect Work Order Management Solution Look
Like?’

If you want to develop a product marketplace or improve your current, you probably need to find a reliable delivery service company to integrate its API into your platform.

Each marketplace has its own requirements to delivery companies depending on the industry, location, audience, and business model. However, there are common characteristics you need take into account to make the delivery experience flawless. Let’s dive right into them!

Main criteria of delivery service apps

Transparent shipping costs and guaranteed prices

Make sure that the platform provides upfront prices without any additional charges and commissions. It’s important for the user to see the exact final price, as well as all the elements it includes.

Strong verification process

Ensure that the drives on the platform go through a thorough verification process and include all driving credentials such as car registration, car insurance, and drivers license.

Availability of different sized vehicles

If your marketplace sells large items, check if the delivery company provides different types of vehicles for safe and smooth delivery.

Lifting services

Lifting services for large items delivery will be a great bonus for your users.

Real-time delivery tracking

Ensure that a delivery app provides real-time map with the ability to track the delivery and receive it in a desired time and place.

API with scalable features

Before choosing a delivery solution for your marketplace, ensure that it has API with detailed documentation and necessary features.

Clear arrival and delivery times

Make sure that the users can see delivery time and receive notifications when their item has arrived.

Delivery damage coverage and insurance

To protect the products you deliver, choose a delivery company that covers theft, damage, and loss of the merchandise.

Trial period

Each idea has to be tested. It would be great if you can choose a trial period to see if the delivery app works for your business.

Community and support

Before integrating a delivery API into your platform, check if it has a well-supported community, detailed documentation and customer support.

Delivery service apps with APIs and their main features

We have prepared a list of delivery dervice companies for your marketplace that provide APIs. Let’s check them out.

Dropoff is an on-demand delivery service focused on B2B delivery. It offers scalable and innovative solutions to optimize and improve delivery for both small businesses and enterprises. Its main features include:

Flexible scheduling

Tracking technology

Transparent prices

Driver ratings

Fully insured and HIPAA compliant driver fleet

Feature-rich API

24 / 7 on-demand and pre-scheduled delivery

Dropoff tracker to know the status of all your shipments

Mobile app for iOS and Android

Dropoff will come in handy for such industries as retail, healthcare, food and grocery, business and industrial services.

BoxC is a logistics platform for managing international trading from oversea merchants to international buyers. Their main services include:

Inventory and shipping management

Custom return policies

Bulk shipping

Customized solutions especially for your business

International dropshipping

Delivery tracking

Delivery estimate

We hope that this list was helpful for you. The main takeaway is to choose a flexible company, that can customize their solutions to your business needs. If you have any questions or need a piece of advice, feel free to leave a comment below!

I was curious about what program for home management I can develop with Node.js, let's say, during the weekend. I have decided in favor of the voice sensor, to switch the light on and off with simple clapping. I have used ordinary wireless headphones with the microphone. I connected them to Raspberry PI and developed a short algorithm that responded to clapping. This is what I have got:

I have used a diode for this because didn't have a relay on hand.I have described how you can connect your Raspberry to 220 V in the previous article.

The sound itself is a vibration of the air. During clapping the air is sharply disturbed. This, in turn, applies pressure to the microphone's membrane. This pressure is fixed in the form of the analog signal and applied to the sound card. It turns the analog signal into a digital one. This is how the recording of the clapping looks:

Above you can see the air fluctuation (so-called sound amplitude) caused by clapping. The louder is the sound, the higher is the amplitude.

A +1-1 (t)

This is caused by the change of amplitude (A) from -1 to +1 depending on the time (t). In general, your device perceives a sound as a large array of numbers from -1 to +1, where each number is the value of a sound amplitude at a certain moment of time. The number of such moments is bigger than 10 000 per second (depending on the quality of recording).

How to detect a clap

To be honest, it is simple enough. All you have to do is to find a certain amplitude threshold limited by a particular period of time. If the amplitude of the sound exceeds this threshold and doesn’t exceed a certain period of time, it means that the clap took place.
These values may be determined experimentally.

On this image, t - is the minimum clap duration, T - a threshold of the maximum amplitude.

First of all,you have to make your program listen to the microphone. SOX protocol of a sound exchange is a perfect choice for this purpose. You can use mic package to simplify the process of setting things up. This is a simple package with detailed and easy documentation. The simplest code of the recording will look like this:

As you may notice, the documentation of the library provides the instructions on how to save recording to the file. We don’t use any files in this case, as we only have to listen to the microphone without saving this information. Settings in this library mean that the a two-channel recording will be made on the device plughw:0. You can see the list of the available devices with the arecord -l. command.

One more important point to remember is that the sensitivity of your microphone is limited by your operating system. You can regulate the microphone's sensitivity in the sound settings of your operating system. However, if you use raspberry, you often have to work with the help of console. You can change the microphone’s sensitivity with the help of alsamixer command. Check it out in more detail here.

Then you have to turn these data into the array of numbers (value of the amplitude at a certain moment of time), which will help you compare the amplitude with a certain threshold. You can do this with the help of wav-decoder package.

But here is a tricky bit. This package was not developed for working with the streams, but only with wav files. So you can’t directly decode buffer with it, because mic records data in the raw format. To turn raw into wav you need a header. Header is the information about the type and additional settings of the recording, which we have actually transferred to mic library. The package waveheader is exactly what we need. Here is how ouron data method will look:

Now you can work with the sound wave in the digital format. You can find the maximum wave value and compare it to the value of threshold. You can set the threshold value by the way of experiment. I have found that its optimal value equals >0.7 (70% from the maximum value of microphone's amplitude)

Now we need to calculate the time interval. The method on data appears approximately each 90 ms. However, this time interval is not long enough for the clap. I took the value 500 ms for it. That’s why I started to process the data and check if the sound signal was exceeded only after this time has passed.

You have to save data buffer for more precise data decoding into the numerical expression. It will come handy for work with more complex algorithms of sound wave processing. However, you can decode it at once and just save the array of decoded numbers. In such a way you can program the logic of processing on the clap. All you have to do is to manage one of the Raspberry PI outputs connected to the power supply at your home. I have described how to do it in the previous article.

Possible problems and ways to solve them

The algorithm I have described is just an idea you can turn into the solution. You can improve and enrich it depending on your needs. To make things easier for you, I have described the main challenges you can encounter and ways to deal with them.

Noise

Noise can become a real obstacle for the proper algorithm operation. If you turn the music too loud, the algorithm may not work as desired, as the sound amplitude will exceed the limit. To avoid this, you can take into account the clap duration with the highest maximum amplitude.
Consequently, there should be silence before and after the clap. Here is how it looks schematically:

During the period t, maximum amplitude should be bigger than T, and during the periods t-1 and t+1 - lower.

Double clap

You may also write an algorithm for double-clap detection. Here is how I have implemented this. I have made several recordings and found out that the duration of one clap is approximately 100 ms. There is approximately the same period of silence between the claps. In addition, theoretically there should be also silence before and after the series of claps. Here is how it looks schematically:

So, сonsider the period of claps, during which the maximum amplitude is higher than the limit, and time between the claps, where the maximum amplitude is lower than the limit.

If you work with more complex sound algorithms, you can use the spectrum analysis and Fourier transform algorithms. This algorithm shows at what frequency sound signal has the highest value. I have found some of its implementations in npm ecosystem. Personally I have used this frequencyjs library.

Wrapping Up

The algorithm described in this article is simple and “rough”. My aim was to show you how many possibilities you have with the technologies available out there. I have implemented the algorithm for this article with the help of Node.js platform, which proves its сapabilities and potential. If you have any questions or ideas, let me know in comments below:)

If you run B2B business (especially a company which relates to technologies
or engineering), you might find work order management system (or CMMS) as a
vital need for your organization. B2B companies of international
recognition and the ones which are in constant growth phase might require
cleaning, maintenance & repair, electricity and other facility-related
3rd-party services and resources to keep everything neat and vital
equipment working and fixed. That’s how the road of opportunities opens up
before facility service providers and web/mobile work order management
systems.

We’ve prepared an eBook on ‘What Is A Perfect Work Order Management
System?’ to help you learn the most important ins and outs of work order
management business in B2B context.

In this paper we’ll dive into:

Brief overview of what is a work order management system and the
provided list of popular solutions (SAP, Oracle, IBM, etc.)

The problems work order management systems/CMMS solve and benefits
they bring, value proposition of such products for both customer
categories - a company and a service provider (B2B point of view)

The set of features a scalable order management system should have.
Capterra’s best recommendations on CMMS functionality

Apiko’s expertise in the development of work order management
system. In this part we unveil the following:

B2B e-commerce industry is a gold mine for opportunities nowadays. It is still growing, so you have all the chances to disrupt the industry by creating a B2B online marketplace for the niche you work in.

In this article, we unveil best practices on developing your own custom B2B wholesale marketplace. You will learn about its concept, types, essential features, and monetization models.

What is B2B wholesale marketplace

B2B wholesale marketplace serves as a platform, that connects wholesale suppliers with bulk buyers in different industries. Its main idea is to automate selling and buying in B2B field, improve customer experience, and make the whole process easy and transparent.

It still has a lot of space for improvement, especially when it comes to managing the process and keeping all the important information in one place.

Giuseppe Lanni, director of business development at B2B ecommerce provider Sana Commerce, said: “A lot of B2Bs have portals out there. The majority of them are just very old, very antiquated.”

B2B companies need to rethink the way they connect with customers and broaden the number of promotional channels. B2B e-commerce platforms remain one of the most effective channels for buyers and suppliers, where they can grow their revenue.

Let’s review the main types of B2B marketplace platforms out there.

Types of B2B wholesale platforms

Customer-oriented

Such platforms are managed by the companies that look for various products or services.They allow buyers compare prices, offers, and choose companies that meet their preferences.

Supplier-oriented

These platforms are managed by suppliers, who want to extend their marketing channels and reach a wider audience.

Independent

Marketplaces, managed by a third party, that acts as a mediator between buyers and suppliers.

Vertical

Platforms, that focus on one particular industry, often at a local level.

Horizontal

This type of B2B platforms connects businesses from different industries and geographical areas.

How to build your custom B2B marketplace platform

One of the reasons of B2B startups failure is a not clearly defined value proposition. To establish long-term relationships with your customers, your platform should provide functionality that brings value to their business.

Here are the main features you can include in your wholesale marketplace platform to hit the mark.

Basic features you need for B2B wholesale platform

Detailed product description

Make this section explicit. A description should include product specifications, availability information, shipping options, and ability to upload HD video and images. Look at this great example of product description in B2B e-commerce website for tractor brands. It showcases not only a brief description but also key features, models, versions, virtual 360 view and video.

The product page should include as many details as possible to remove any obstacles in a decision-making process.

Advanced filtering

Narrow the search results on your marketplace with convenient filter navigation. Add the functionality to filter products by keywords, size, color, type, and compare them with other options. Based on the user behavior, you can also include search suggestions, auto-suggest, and related search.

A great example of convenient filtering is Blake - e-commerce website for selling envelopes. Just look how many options you have to find the exact product you need.

Usually, online platforms in B2B industry contain a lot of different product catalogs, so make sure they are easy to find.

Product catalogs

Give suppliers an option to upload catalogs where they can showcase their products with the opportunity to order them right from the catalog. Depending on the customer segment, you can include multiple catalog views. For example, you can add fields, where users select the budget, industry, and browse results related to their specific needs.

Usually, the buyers in B2B industry are very picky and spend a lot of time before making a decision. By incorporating e-catalogs you give your users an interactive and visual way to learn about your products.

For example, Nover, wholesale website in the furniture industry, offers additional brochures that include online catalogs with a detailed product description.

Add interactive features to the catalogs such as popups, animations, videos, and forms for lead generation. One more nice idea is to enable inviting prospects to the product catalog and providing them with custom-made product showcases.

B2B wholesale suppliers need analytics tools that will help them to monitor and measure their success. Incorporate real-time report feature into your online B2B marketplace. It gives suppliers the opportunity to see traffic to their listings, number of times their products have been viewed, number of unique visitors, and most popular listings.

Personalized recommendations

If your B2B platform contains a lot of products, it may be difficult for users to discover those that suit them best. That’s where recommendation algorithms come to help. Personalized product recommendations will help you deliver best experiences for each of customer segment.

Personalized prices

In most cases, pricing in B2B industry significantly differs from B2C one. If your platform deals with businesses of different sizes and needs, customize your prices to different segments by including price calculators or showing sample prices for a set of typical orders.

According to Gartner report, B2B sellers that incorporate personalization will boost their revenue up to 15%.

Most of the B2B websites ignore this point and don’t provide or personalize prices on their websites. In this case, your platform lacks transparency and trust, so users will more likely go to your competitors.

Real-time order reports

Give B2B suppliers an access to advanced and detailed order analytics. With real-time order reports, your users can run sales summaries in real time by using templates or creating custom reports. For example, Joor - wholesale fashion marketplace - offers advanced order reports, where brands can analyze their performance and track sales metrics.

Include the functionality that allows to track information about active, pending or cancelled orders and view order details to analyze and forecast sales.

Integrations with inventory management systems

Integration with inventory management software will help you to create omni-channel experience, customize customer purchases, manage all the operations remotely, and track important analytics.

Profitable and sustainable business model for B2B marketplace platform

Think about creating a solid business model for each group of your customers. Here are some strategies on how you can do it for your B2B marketplace.

Find what problem to solve

One of the challenges B2B e-commerce industry faces nowadays is a lack of personalized customer service. I have found an amazing quote in the Digital river report about the personalization and customer experience in B2B field.

The point here is to create a platform that will remove any boundaries between the suppliers and buyers, provide them with efficient communication channels and analytics tools.

Segment your audience

In comparison with B2C industry, B2B organizations lag behind when it comes to personalizing their services and treating each customer as an individual.

Segmentation - this is a magic word that can make your strategy more targeted and customized.

When you carefully choose a different approach to each group of customers, they will reward you with loyalty. Segment your audience and create a strong value proposition for each group. Here is how you can do this:

By company size

B2B companies need to personalize their approach to customers and include offers for different-size businesses (from small companies to big enterprises). Help your users find products and offers that suit their needs and budget.

By buying behavior

You can personalize your offers by analyzing the customer behavior on your platform, such as time spent on site, last purchased items, items viewed or items in shopping cart or average spendings.

By pricing

By customizing your price for different customers and their buying preferences, you will increase the number of revenue channels and get more opportunities to boost profit.

You can segment the audience by order volume, stock levels, location and shipping tariffs. When the product pricing adapts to the customer conditions, it creates more trust and transparency in the buying process.

Based on this data, you can provide them with personalized product recommendations, catalogues, and offers.

Сome up with different revenue channels

Usually business model includes two types of revenue channels: revenue from one-time deals and revenue from periodic payments. To choose what type of revenue suits your business best, try to answer the following questions:

What are your clients ready to pay for?

How do they pay now?

How would they like to pay?

What profit do you receive from these payments?

Can you increase this profit?

Let’s review the most widely used revenue generation activities for B2B industry:

Transaction fee

This model is very popular as it can be used in any industry. It involves a charge of a commission from the transactions on your platform. Don’t make this fee very high in the beginning. Show the value of your platform first and ensure suppliers and bulk buyers that they will get revenue from it.

Subscription fee

This revenue depends on the period during which clients use your service. The longer the period, the higher is the fee. You may offer different types of subscription based on the number of products users can list on your B2B platform or a number of features they can use.

Revenue from advertisement

Another way to generate revenue is to take a fee from advertising companies that register on your website. This monetization strategy should be used only when your marketplace has gained a traction and a large base of users.

Revenue from value-added services

Let’s review the main value-added elements you can incorporate on your B2B marketplace:

Services that generate benefits for buyers and suppliers

Access to premium features

More delivery and shipment options (land, sea, air shipping)

Credits

Warehousing services

Conclusion

I hope that after reading this article you have gained some insights about building B2B wholesale marketplace. What really matters here is to focus on your users, make continuous research and saturate your platform with usefulness. Have something to add? Leave a comment below and let us know what do you think:)

Let’s assume that you’ve read our previous article about what GraphQL is in
‘
Building Scalable Enterprise Products with GraphQL
’ and have a theoretical understanding of the concept behind GraphQL . Now
it's about a time to see this technology in action. In this small GraphQL
server tutorial we will take a look how to build a server-side app like
google play music, using GraphQL with MongoDB/NodeJs/Express.

GraphQL server setup

What is the first thing you are trying to do when you start learning a new
language? Yeah, let's start our GraphQL server tutorial by saying hello to
the world with GraphQL:

And root.graphql

Several key points to highlight form the examples provided above:

You can add GraphQL to your project as a regular express middleware
often on ‘/public’ or `/graphql` endpoint.

GraphQL requires request to be in json format. So we need
bodyParser.json() to build a music streaming app that would work
correctly

We are using .graphql files for our type definitions. The main
benefit of this approach is clear syntax which is a really valuable
for big GraphQL schema example. If you don’t use any tools like
webpack or Babel, you can read files with fs module, like we did in
this GraphQL server tutorial.

Now, run the project and open the following address in the browser: http://localhost:3000/graphiql. You will get to GraphiQL UI tool. On the left sidebar type { hello } and
you will see the following:

Type Definition

Now we are ready to declare our schemas. Let’s take a look at our Track
type.

After we are done with our GraphQL types for tracks and artists, the next
step is to create a special top-level type, called Query by convention:

Mongoose models

Before we move to the implementation of resolvers, let's make a quick
overview of Mongoose modal definition. Note that the schema of your DB
collection isn’t related to any relevant type definition, but in most cases
it will have a similar structure.

GraphQL resolvers example

So how does GraphQL resolver look like? Well, it's a plain JavaScript
function that takes four arguments: the previous object, an object of
passed arguments, context and info about a request. The resolver may be
synchronous or return a promise. Actually, Mongoose queries aren't promises but we can use them in the same
manner (learn about the difference between queries and promises from Mongoose's docs) so our resolvers for root queries can be quite straightforward
requests to DB

It's not a complete example yet. Artists query should return [Artist!] with
tracks and albums fields which are not stored in artists collection.
Basically, if some fields from GraphQL type aren’t in the returned object,
or are modified, we should implement additional resolvers for such fields.
Here are the resolvers for Artist type:

As you can see, their structure is look-alike, except for artistType which
is a little bit confusing. Let’s figure out why:

artistType has an abstract interface type and GraphQL must resolve
some particular type, like Band or Single. That’s why, in this
GraphQL server tutorial, we recommend you to create special
__resolveType which helps GraphQL to make the right choice.

Since BandParticipant should enable us to find the Band by its
current member, we need to modify artistType object to drill it to
down to current artists _id.

Data loaders

What about the performance of the app, powered by GraphQL server? Let’s
take a look at the example with Albums endpoint. Imagine that we are trying
to fetch 50 documents in a single request and our query is equal to:

In this GraphQL server tutorial, we will fetch 50 album docs in a single
request to DB first, which is totally ok.

But after that, we get executed resolvers for fields like artists, tracks
and title Track for each album that will also produce separate requests to
DB. So the total number of requests to DB just for one GraphQL query to the
Albums endpoint might be 1 + 50 * 3 and obviously lead to slow execution.

Fortunately, this problem can be easily resolved using Data Loaders (read
more about DataLoaders on Facebook’s Github page). The main idea of dataloader is batching our requests in a single tick of event loop. DataLoader will gather all the requests and execute them once
instead of immediately executed requests sent to the DB. Here is the
example of artists and tracks loaders for our app like google play music.

Now we should add instances of dataloaders to GraphQL middleware’s context
option. It’s important to create new instances of data loaders per each
request to avoid issues related to caching old data from previous requests.

Once we are done with the previous step, we can access created dataloaders
from context (third argument) in resolvers and replace Mongoose
find/findById with loadMany/load.

As a result, we will make only 3 requests to DB: the first one stands for
Albums, the second is for Artists, and the third one is for all Tracks.

Mutations

We were talking about fetching data with queries till this time. Now, to
continue to build GraphQL server, we have to make some changes in DB, so we
should use mutations. They mostly look the same as queries do, but have
their own differences:

Request to GraphQL starts with keyword `mutation`

All mutation endpoints should be under Mutation type.

For mutations used POST method instead of GET method.

All mutations run in a queue, as opposed to queries which can be
run in parallel.

Very often mutations can take a large list of arguments which makes your
query definition difficult to read. For this reason, there’s a special
Input object type that can be passed as argument in GraphQL schema
language.

Here is an example of what a mutation might look like:.

Input type provides some top-level validation so we can make sure that
received input has `releasedAt` field which is not-nullable and has Date
type. That means that we can avoid some additional server-side validation
like if (!input.releasedAt), etc. because GraphQL does it by itself.

The example below shows the result of mutation calling to add new track to
DB. As you can see, we’re also returning created track immediately, and can
use subselection in mutation like in regular query. Pay attention that in
previous examples, when we were passing values directly to the query, we
used something called static params. But most of queries in real-life
application will take arguments via variables.

Summary

As we can see from this GraphQL server tutorial, building a GraphQL backend
for the app like Google Play Music project is not so hard. In conclusion,
I’d like to add that GraphQL has a several advantages over regular REST
APIs:

More efficient way to fetch data since we can use multiple queries
in on request to server.

Predictable shape of data returned from server;

With sub-selections it’s possible to fetch specific fields only if
needed.

Powerful data validations on field level

An easy way to resolve complex relation structure between DB
collections.

GraphiQL provides cool tools to test your API without writing a
single line of UI code

Strong JS community with a lot of useful packages

We hope that you’ll find this article helpful, whatever kind of the project you’re dealing with, whether it’s an online marketplace platform or a music
streaming app.